Top Books read 4th quarter 2007 October -December

We still have a month of reading to go but I've had a post-it stuck to my laptop for weeks to remind me to do this. For those who are new, this has been done each quarter this year. Post your favorites for the last three months of 2007 whenever you are comfortable.

Also look for the end of the year threads...

I have three so far and, depending on how long it takes me to finish War and Peace, this may be it!

Wizard of the Crow by Ngugi wa Thiong'o
A Time to Keep Silence by Patrick Leigh Fermor
War and Peace by Tolstoy.

I will post any additions later in the month.

Batch the first includes Joseph J. Ellis's Founding Brothers and Marina Warner's Joan of Arc: The Image of Female Heroism.

If you're counting when we finish a book, I'd include Helen Castor's Blood and Roses: One Family's Struggle and Triumph During the Tumultuous Wars of the Roses. I finished it October 2nd, but I seem to have missed the third-quarter listing.

So far I will have to say it's:

Mystic River by Dennis Lehane
She's Come Undone by Wally Lamb
Everything She Ever Wanted by Ann Rule

Still got a month to go so maybe I can add a couple more to this list.

Only one!?! Dang, usually I torment myself over which wonderful books to leave out of the top 5. Oh, well. I still have a month to read a few really excellent books.

Okay, the best book I read this quarter and maybe the best I read all year ~ well, one of five bests ~ was Devil in the White City. So very, very good, I gave it a 5+ out of 5.

I haven't read much the past month or so, but I have two that definitely made the top 5 this quarter:

World War Z by Max Brooks
How I live now by Meg Rosoff

I'll add more as they come up. :)

Happy reading in December, everyone!

For me only 2: Lovely Bones and Shadow of the Wind. Both great reads.

Since October, the best I've read have been:
Selling Anxiety: How the News Media Scare Women
The Golden Compass (Yup, had to read it because of the movie-actually, I've had it on my bookshelf for 10 years. I only read it because someone told me I should boycott it)
A History of the World in 6 Glasses
Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea

I've read some excellent books this quarter; it's hard to pick the top five, but I'll give it a go. I still have a couple I'll be reading this month that may bump up.

Not in order; Subject to change:

The Hours by Michael Cunningham
Klee Wyck by Emily Carr
Out Stealing Horses by Per Petterson
Fingersmith by Sarah Waters

and #5 is between Mr. Pip and The Forest Lover.

So far, not in order of preference, but of reading. A few of these are not because of the writing per se, but because they are memorable and I think will leave an impression on me. One is a re-read.

Death on the Nileby Agatha Christie
Heart-shaped Box by Joe Hill
Devices and Desires by P.D. James
The Devil You Know by Mike Carey
The Chess Machine by Robert Lohr

Don't look now, but Heart-shaped Box might get the bump - by The Prestige. I'm not done with it, but it is excellent. Not much in common with the movie though I do like the movie for its own merits.

This quarter I'm posting my top four favorites in the genres of romance and young adult which makes up the majority of my reading.

Romance:

Ransom/Winds of Change by Lee Rowan
It Happened One Autumn by Lisa Kleypas
Dark Possession by Christine Feehan

For young adult favorites my top three are:
Red Handed/Blacklisted by Gena Showalter
Falling for Romeo by Jennifer Laurens
Everlost by Neil Shusterman

The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco
Teatro Grottesco by Thomas Ligotti
Cuentos y Aguafuertes by Roberto Arlt
Punktown by Jeffrey Thomas

The Famished Road, Ben Okri
Midaq Alley, Naguib Mafouz
Desertion, Abdulrazak Gurnah
Carnival Culture: the Trashing of Taste in America by James Twitchell
Of Plymouth Plantation by William Bradford (a re-read)

Just three truly stand out this quarter:

Interpreter of Maladies, by Jumpa Lahiri
A Thousand Splendid Suns, by Khaled Hosseini
True History of the Kelly Gang, by Peter Carey

The Glass Castle, by Jeannette Walls
and (so far, I've been pretty busy)
Angela's Ashes by Frank McCourt

I have no clue why I have been reading memoirs a lot.

The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan: Squeaked in - finished October 1st.
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen: Haven't read for 10 years; Emma is still my favorite, though.
The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien: Took me by surprise as I don't like war themes at all, but I like what he does with the language and the idea of story vs. truth.

Currently reading Mudbound, which may make the list - so far so good.

Author touchstones not working

The Road
Cormac McCarthy
Sea Glass Anita Shreve
The knitting Circle Ann Hood
Dream Catcher Margaret Salinger
The Suicide of ReasonLee Harris. Maybe there will be more, still 3 weeks to go.

Since there's no party on this thread, I'll post my top five reads for 4th quarter, 2007, on this thread now. :-)

1. The Ministry of Special Cases – Nathan Englander - really loved the writing in this book, not a word wasted
2. As Nature Made Him - John Colapinto - an outrageous story of gender identity
3. In the Country of Men – Hirsham Matar - the only novel I've ever read by a Libyan author
4. My Invented Country – Isabel Allende - my first book by this well-known author
5. Marley & Me – John Grogan - a heart-warming dog story

I need to add one to my list above >#9:

Accordion Crimes by Annie Proulx.

in order:

1. Spring Snow by Yukio Mishima
2. The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
3. The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
4. Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut

I doubt I'll finish another whole book by the end of the month, so here goes:

The Accidental by Ali Smith
The Small House at Allington by Anthony Trollope
The Gathering by Anne Enright
England's Mistress: the infamous life of Emma Hamilton by Kate Williams
The Whole World and Other Stories by Ali Smith

Adding to my list #4 Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt by Anne Rice

#22 I really enjoyed that one too, but I read it last year so can't put it on my list for this year. ;)

#23 Storeetllr Did it make you cry when you found out what Herod did when Jesus was born? It made me cry. That was just a shocker, but Anne Rice is good at doing that in her books.

I have read some awesome books this quarter:

In order?
The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield. For anyone who loves a good yarn....
Sharp Objects by Gillian Flynn.
Trust - Cynthia Ozick.
Wide Sargasso Sea - Jean Rhys.

The Confessions of St. Augustine
50 Questions on the Natural Law by Charles Rice
The Spirit of the Liturgy by Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger
Stepping Heavenward by Elizabeth Prentiss
J.R.R. Tolkien's Sanctifying Myth by Bradley Birzer

1. Sophie's World: A Novel About the History of Philosophy by Jostein Gaarder (1994) - I took notes :)
2. The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman (1995) - because it was fun
3. Elmer Gantry by Sinclair Lewis (1927) - which has me wondering about Huckabee
4. A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini (2007)
5. Tokyo Year Zero by David Peace (2007) - I'm seem a little mixed on this one

Random order:

The Gathering by Anne Enright
Consumption by Kevin Patterson
The Yacoubian Building by Alaa Al Aswany
The Emigrants by W.G. Sebald
The Broken Shore by Peter Temple

Random Order:

Devil in the White City by Erik Larson
Heartsick by Chelsea Cain
American Gods by Neil Gaiman
Friend of the Devil by Peter Robinson
Here If You Need Me by Kate Braestrup

1.) A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith
2.) We Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver
3.) Bel Canto by Ann Patchett
4.) Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri
5.) Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut

1) Vanishing Point by David Markson
2) The master by Colm Toibin
3) Family matters by Rohinton Mistry
4) The remains of the day by Kazuo Ishiguro
5) I know this much is true by Wally Lamb

Hmm - the touchstone for the master is wrong and it doesn't want to fix itself -

I am adding to my list in #2 above, so the list is now:

Wizard of the Crow by Ngugi wa Thiong'o
A Time to Keep Silence by Patrick Leigh Fermor
War and Peace by Tolstoy
The Tenderness of Wolves by Stef Penney

This one's hard . . . I've read some really great books over the past few months. In no order, I think these were my 5 favourite:

Enduring Love, by Ian McEwan
The French Lieutenant's Woman, by John Fowles (only half way through, actually, but so far it's great).
Mosquito, by Roma Tearne
The Golden Compass, by Philip Pullman
The Pursuit of Love, by Nancy Mitford

rebeccanyc, I have The Tenderness of Wolves on my wishlist from recommendations of mutual LT friends, but I will certainly also keep your recommendation in the back of my mind when I get through most of my 'required' reading and start moving some of those titles into a shopping cart!

avaland, I really enjoyed it -- had trouble putting it down in fact, although I was occasionally troubled by characters using words that I didn't think existed/were used at the time the story took place (but I could be wrong about that).

I'm a big fan of Stef Penney's The Tenderness of Wolves as well, and was so thoroughly engrossed by it, that I hardly noticed any anachronistic speech or phrases that might have crept into her narrative.

Since it seems unlikely that I'm going to read anything in the next few days better than the five books below, I guess I'll post my list now:

In transit by Brigid Brophy
The snow ball by Brigid Brophy
My Emily Dickinson by Susan Howe
Kafka in Bronteland by Tamar Yellin
Passing for Human by Jody Scott

Howe's My Emily Dickinson is literary criticism (albeit lit crit of a most creative and poetic kind); the four other books are fiction.

#36, LouisBranning, I really only noticed two, but they really jumped out at me: "mentor" (which I think of, in usage anyway, as pretty contemporary) and "shambolic" (which I had to look up and seems to be contemporary British slang). Both words were used several times.

In order:

Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry
Grapes of Wrath Steinbeck
Rebecca Daphne DuMaurier
Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout (an LTearly reviewer)
First Man in Rome by Coleeen McCullough

I have also just started The Story of Lucy Gault by William Trevor which is beautiful so far and that I should finish -- it has potential to make the list.

The Lies of Locke Lamora by Scott Lynch
Red Seas Under Red Skies by Scott Lynch
Franny and Zooey by J.D. Salinger
Buddha by Osamu Tezuka (this is actually series, but it's really more of a very long story told in multiple volumes)
The Josephine B. Trilogy by Sandra Gulland (ditto)

And looking back, it was a pretty amazing quarter, so I also have some honourable mentions:

Nine Stories by J.D. Salinger
Homecoming by Robin Hobb
The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss
Siddhartha by Herman Hesse

I read a lot of four-star books during the fourth quarter. Only three ranked higher than four stars, so I will list those here, in order:

1) A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini
2) The Muse Asylum by David Czuchlewski
3) The Painted Veil by W. Somerset Maugham

I am ready to post my 5 best for this quarter -not in any particular order.
The Arrival by Shaun Tan -this is a children's book with illustrations-no words. The story is told eloquently with the reader drawn into the emotions of the characters.
The Ministry of Special Cases by Nathan Englander. This is a heartbreaking story of family. I must admit that I understood the background much better as I had previously read Bodies and Souls- The Tragic Plight of Three Jewish Women Forced into Prostitution in the Americas by Isabel Vincent. *spoiler-the cemetary issue was much clearer
Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell This is one of the best books that I read this year.
No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy-this is one book that I read after seeing the movie as I wanted to figure out what was happening. The book gave me some answers and it was also a wonderful read.
Tyrants : Stories by Marshall N. Klimasewiski This book was an Early Reviewers book that I really liked. Thank you LT for introducing me to an author I want to continue reading.

Home to Holly Springs by Jan Karon.
the Gift by Richard Paul Evans
Mornings on Horseback by David McCullough
The Choice by Nicholas Sparks
The Bible Jesus Read by Philip Yancey

Have many choices from Christmas on what to read next but looking at Alexander McCall Smith or The Kite Runner

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
Crow Lake by Mary Lawson
The Air We Breathe by Andrea Barrett
The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman

My reading really fell off once the holidays hit, so I only had four good ones this quarter.

I don't imagine I will finish another book by tomorrow night but to amend my list posted in #13, I would have to knock off the last two books and add Sleepwalking Land by Mai Couto and Women of Algiers in their Apartment by Assia Djebar; however, it doesn't see fair to try to weigh fiction against nonfiction or vice versa, does it?

Here are my top books for the 4th quarter of 2007:

1. Now We Are Sick, edited by Neil Gaiman and Stephen Jones
2. The Secret Books of Venus I and II, by Tanith Lee
3. A Bed Of Earth (The Gravedigger's Tale), by Tanith Lee
4. Something Rotten, by Jasper Fforde
5. Middle Age: A Romance, by Joyce Carol Oates

I was able to combine fiction and nonfiction for my best-of list this quarter, which was too difficult to do in the third quarter:

Mason & Dixon by Thomas Pynchon
Ship Fever by Andrea Barrett
A Thread of Grace by Mary Doria Russell
The Twyborn Affair by Patrick White
The Worst Hard Time by Timothy Egan

mrstreme, Somerset Maugham's 1925 novel The Painted Veil made my favorites list for the year too.

#49 - LouisBranning - This was my first Maugham book but definitely not my last. I enjoyed The Painted Veil immensely.

My top five for this quarter:
His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman
The Slave Ship: A Human History by Marcus Rediker
Stardust by Neil Gaiman
The Nijmegen Proof by S. Barksworth
A More Perfect Constitution by Larry Sabato